Book review.

A Cape Cod Memoir That's No Day At The Beach

July 10, 1997|By Reviewed by Joseph P. Kahn, The Boston Globe.

A Wild, Rank Place:

One Year on Cape Cod

By David Gessner

University Press of New England, 135 pages, $19.95

Cape Cod is a place most of us associate with the pursuit of leisure, not ghosts. Tourists flock to this sandy peninsula far more often to escape reality than to embrace it, and almost certainly not to examine it in the kind of microscopic, existential detail that David Gessner does in his highly readable, disarmingly self-conscious meditation on life and nature, ancestry and mortality.

To Gessner, who took leave from a Colorado writing program a few years ago and moved into his family's summer home in East Dennis, Mass., the Cape Cod of clam shacks, curio shops and clogged traffic rotaries is largely a mirage, a seasonal Chimera--no more spiritually nourishing than a $2 corn dog.

A Harvard graduate in his early 30s, Gessner moved back to the Cape after having undergone treatment for testicular cancer. His father, a retired textile executive, also had cancer and would, as it turned out, die within the year.

Gessner moved to the Cape in the cool quiet of autumn. His aim was to live as healthy and simple an existence as he could. In his backpack was a well-thumbed copy of Henry David Thoreau's "Cape Cod," while in his head was the stubborn notion to get away from writing fiction (he had already finished, but not sold, a novel, after plying his trade as a carpenter and editorial cartoonist) and "tell the truth with simple planks," as he observes at one point.

The rugged beauty of Cape Cod in the off-season would be the raw lumber for Gessner's journalistic handiwork. Whatever truth was to be hewn from this would presumably come from a close examination of his troubled relationship with his father, of the author's ongoing struggle with disease and death and from Gessner's considering what it means to be an artist, or not to be, in present-day society.

I admit this blueprint struck me at first as unpromising at best, self-indulgent at worst. But living inside what he calls a "spinning narcissistic world, constantly creating my own day-to-day drama," Gessner makes the drama matter to the rest of us. Along the way he introduces us to some marvelously rendered minor characters. Serious environmental issues are also addressed, and Gessner uses the Cape's rising incidence of cancer as an occasion to extol a certain outrage over the despoiling of pristine places.

Though wry and funny in many places, this book in fact is filled with a palpable anger: anger at Gessner's own failures and poor decisions in finding a foothold in the professional world; anger, unavoidably, at his physical fragility. Mostly, though, anger at his father for being an obsessive, hypercritical parent who drinks too much, says too little and who, in the end, proves to be merely mortal.

There are small surprises on nearly every page of this touching, troubling memoir. While it may not be the conventional book we cart off to beaches in the summer, a reader could do worse and learn less.